The Mystery of Mastery with Adam Gopnik

The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States since it was established in 1861. There have been 3,517 people awarded with the medal. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. And our new podcast from Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia is about those heroes, what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor Stories of Courage on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

And finally, I thought, like the man said, give the people what they want. So coming up this year, we have the standard old school revisionist history lineup, including some on education, a crazy one about mothers and a bunch on guns. That I'm very excited about. But we're also doing more episodes answering your questions or arguing with you. With the help of our embarrassingly overqualified ombudsperson, Maria Konnikova. You can reach us by the way, and Maria at info at pushkin..fm if you have questions or concerns, or just want to rant for a while.

And one of my favorite things we're doing, though, is we're bringing you a series of conversations, live talks or taped live. Anyway. With people I admire, people I want to learn something from and who I think you'll enjoy as well. We had an amazing reaction to the chat with Justin Richman, and if you haven't heard that yet, please go back and listen.

This week and next, we're running a match set of revisionist history live conversations we taped at the 92nd Street Y in New York. The first today's episode was with my old friend, New Yorker Magazine colleague and most crucially, fellow Canadian Adam Gopnik. Maybe you know his most famous book, Paris to the Moon, or perhaps you saw his cameo in the film Tar, where he played himself convincingly, I might add.

Adam has a new book, The Real Work on the Mystery of Mastery, in which he follows masters of their craft. To find out just how they do what they do. So here we go, my conversation with the one and only Adam Gopnik.

Thank you all for coming, Adam.

It was the dirtiest thing.

I start with an idea I'd like to explore, search for someone to be kind of window dressing, someone appropriate to dress it up and then pursue it. This is the problem with my writing, of course, because the reader senses halfway through that. I've chosen the subject, the person, simply as a convenience to advance this agenda of mine.

The great, transformative moment of my life as a writer, my life as a man, as a person, was when I joined the New Yorker in 1986. And I was put to work. Writing the talk of the town back in those days, the talk of the town was beautifully anonymous. That was part of the glory of it, because John McPhee would contribute, or John Updike, and then a little Schnorrer like me would be thrown into the mix as well. It was the great epiphany of my life because up until that moment, I had been a graduate student, my whole life, I'd been a graduate student.

I was a graduate student when I was six years old. Because I come from like you, I come from an academic family and that was the way I had been raised, pursuing a P.h.D. since third grade. The way you're trained and taught to think and write is argumentative through buts. My sister Allison Brilliant Mind still works that way. Somebody says something and you controvert it, you say, but on the other hand, that's not entirely true.

People say that parenting is the most important thing in the world, but in truth, you can't parent at all.

Yes, and and that the only way to write beautifully, the only way to write descriptively, evocatively, significantly, was to construct small, descriptive sentences connected by ands, not long, contentious sentences disrupted by buts. And that moment of moving from one to the other was the great moment in my life as a writer.

But let's start with your mother.

The jewelry is a little like barbed wire and is in constant activity, constant activity. Now. I should add that she's a little more subdued now, at 88, than she used to be in the book. I go up to bake with her because I had never done that. I have a complicated relationship with her. I don't mean to be saccharine about it at all.

We're very much alike and she's a driven person, as am I in lots of ways, in every way. But she's an amazing baker, and she's an amazingly inventive and impatient person. I thought in this book, and in life generally, that the best way I could connect with her was through a shared activity. It's always been the best way to connect with her. Can't really talk with her.

I mean, of course you can but have a conversation, but the happiest moments were always when we were doing something together. I have this incredibly intense memory, which the book begins with of when I'm really little with my. I have many sisters, but this is my sister, Allison.

She was unrolling strudel on a table. We were living in a housing project at that point, just watching her looking up and watching her unroll this strudel and make it kind of parchment thin. I thought, that's real. That was my first experience of mastery, that's my mother.

It's the first time I've ever really written about him. About learning to drive, because when I was learning to drive in my 50s with my son Luke, we got our licenses on the same day. I believe that's the only time that's ever happened. My father was haunting me the whole time because my father is the most gently competent human being you will meet. One of the things was he had been driving since he was 14..

He was the sort of person who thought nothing. He has six kids and 20 grandchildren of driving to a grandchild in Baltimore from rural Ontario, where they live, for 19 hours. He just would do things like that, he was an utterly competent man. I think we all make ourselves a little bit in the shadow of our father's accomplishments, but also by bending away from the shadow into our own sunshine.

My father was so super competent in all those ways that I made myself notably incompetent in the little tasks of life. My wife Martha did all the driving in our family. I was the one as my daughter Olivia, who's here someplace tonight, would point out the gendered seat which we usually assign to women in our culture. Where I'm the one passing out the cookies and saying, Hey, kids, kids got to be quiet, mom's trying to find the exit now.

When will we be there? We'll be there soon, I promise you, we'll be there soon. Let mom concentrate. I was in that seat for decades.

Then I wanted to just nudge over to the other seat a bit. That was very much about my father, but absolutely, my mother is the vivid person.

He wrote the screenplay for On the Waterfront and Other Things. He wrote one of the most beautiful and forgotten novels in American English, called The Disenchanted, about his bizarre adventures, writing a screenplay with the then on the brink of death. Scott Fitzgerald It's the most beautiful portrait of Scott Fitzgerald that we have. Remarkable guy and his stuff should be back in print.

I suspect, quick parenthetical, that his name heard him. One of my pet theories is that writers are very dependent on their names, right? There's a moment Dr. Johnson said someplace that. There was a poet laureate in England named Elkanis Settle, and no one could ever believe that he could write a good poem with a name like Elkanis Settle. I have struggled with this my whole life because Gopnik has got to be the single, ugliest, most non-euphonious name.

There is Bud Shulberg, it sounds like a guy who runs a store, whereas J..D. Salinger is clearly a writer of yoke. That's something we all struggle with.

He taught my son Luke card magic, and he was the most exacting, demanding and rewarding, replenishing teacher you could possibly have. Jamie is just a beautifully irascible person who cannot take anything lightly. I say in the book someplace that people don't take magicians seriously. And they go up to the magician and say, Oh, I know how you did that, which is like, going up to Yo-yo Ma and saying, Oh, I know how you did that. You just scraped that thing along the strings, didn't you? I know how you did that.

I have an uncle who does the same thing all the time. Most magicians just kind of bite their lips and say, Oh, good, I'm glad to hear that. Jamie is the one that says, You have no idea how the fuck I did that, You have no fucking idea how I did that, so don't tell me you do.

He's a contentious magician, and it's wonderful, He's brilliant. He's one of my dearest friends. I love him. Exactly because he takes magic at the most serious conceivable level and won't allow it to be minimized or condescended. To, though, he did say to me once, the only reason mimes exist is so the magicians have someone to patronize.

We don't. Magicians have the most beautiful and rapturous shop. Talk of anyone, because they can only talk about it to other magicians. They have a high level of trauma, surgeon-like technique, but they can't tell you or me about it, they can only talk about it to other magicians. So there's an intensity, an intellectual intensity to what they do.

I will add as well, of course, and this is the implicit, if tenderly loving, accusation you're making. I seek out the intellectual magicians, and they seek, and they choose to speak to me.

That spoke somehow to my ideals for writing and my ideals for art generally, and I was very taken, instantly. Taken by the company of magicians. I loved the company of magicians. The people I most have enjoyed hanging out with in life are magicians and cooks, and they have a great deal in common. There's an artisanal basis to everything they do. They are expert at doing something and they tend to be very temperamental.

People who have very difficult lives. Nothing is harder than running a restaurant except running a magic show. And yet the whole purpose of their existence is to delight. And I find there's something sort of noble and even saintly about that.

They have the same kind of passionate shop talk, which I love to hear.

George Plimpton I bring him up only because. In this book, Adam goes on a series of quests to master certain activities baking, boxing, magic, etc. Driving.

So, I greatly admire his prose writing, but it isn't a Plimpton-like book. In the sense that Plimpton's comedy came out of his incapacity to do it. You know, Plimpton was making a. He was a wonderful writer, but he had kind of one joke to tell, right? I attempt to do this thing, I learn a lot and then I fail at it.

And I wanted to tell two jokes. I attempt to do this thing and I enter into the world of the people who do it well. Plimpton did that too, I guess, but yes, certainly. Plimpton is one of the ghosts who's someplace in the back of the book. And I put him in one sentence and you caught it.

My mother was a professor, my father was a professor, all of my brothers and sisters are professors, so I am the only one who isn't. I'm what's called a Jewish dropout.

So I think that that urge to teach, to explicate is very strong. Plimpton was an aristocratic wasp, and for him, teaching and explicating, I think, was a little vulgar.

That turned out not to be the case. But I wanted to do that and I never pursued it adequately. It was one of those things that I left behind too soon in the course of life. A wonderful composer, David Shire, approached me about writing a musical with him. And, somewhat to his shock, I jumped at the opportunity. Because it was the form I love most in the world. And we wrote a show called Our Table, which you can find on Spotify, and we wrote some 60 songs together.

I loved it.

You write 60 songs and you throw out 40.

That's the standard rate at which it's done. It's a funny thing not that the 40 are worse than the 20. It's a weird kind of almost religious discipline that Broadway people have in any way. I love-.

Every Broadway play has 40 songs that are just lying in a vault somewhere.

Every songwriting team and every songwriter will tell you that even Sondheim threw away four different endings for company before he arrived at being alive. It's part of the discipline of the craft, I'm not always sure that it's a productive discipline. In the sense that the ones you throw away may actually be better than the one you arrive at.

Some of those sentences are essays. that's the form I love most in the world is the essay, what's sometimes called the personal essay.

Writing lyrics or writing a show, it's the same enterprise, it's organizing language in ways that express emotion. For me, the thing I love most is exactly the moments in that act, when you get an emotion and an idea humming together. That's what I always try to do in things, what you were talking about before, when it's just ideas, it feels arid to me.

When it's just emotions, it feels amateurish to me. There's no form known to man in which ideas you talked about this in your Paul Simon audiobook. There's no form in which ideas and emotions come into such intimate entanglement as in a song.

Anybody who can write one good song, one memorable song, has got a little bit of purchase on Immortality. I think I've written one, but I will continue to write more.

You embark on a series of things, and implicit in not all of them, but in some of the things that you embark on is the idea that you're never going to be good at them? This is the great discovery of my middle age. When I was very young, I only pursued things that I was good at. I realized when I hit 40 that that was a trap, you know why I realized it?

I realized it because I went to Bard, and when I was using the gym, I saw the Bard lacrosse team practice. I observed them, and I observed that they were the most laughably inept lacrosse team I'd ever seen. My first thought was I have all kinds of athletic pretensions, so I was looking down my nose, then my second thought was. That is fantastic because it means that anyone who wants to play lacrosse at Bard can play lacrosse at Bard. That is such a better model than every other lacrosse team.

If you want to play lacrosse at Johns Hopkins, it's impossible.

And it would get them into Johns Hopkins.

It just is only that feels that way for the hummingbird, right? not for the elephant. And in exactly the same way, the accomplishments that we master, or attempt to master at which we're no good. Give us the same sense of little steps, turning into a seamless sequence. The sense of the flow, which is the key to happiness.

Happiness is absorption, happiness is reaching that flow state, and in a weird way. Any time you achieve it, you have the Hummingbird's heartbeat inside you, you have a strong interior sense. Like the kids at Bard, Right? They didn't know they were bad lacrosse players, and I'm sure they talked about lacrosse all the time and tried to improve their game.

And that's exactly by.

They would be in true awe. It's the same thing I was going to say this with. It. Is only when I became a mediocre runner in my middle age that I began to appreciate what a world-class runner can do.

You know, who said that? Forgive me for a professorial moment. Frederick Law Olmsted, the great designer of Central Park and one of the great American political thinkers, said that the commonplace civilization of a liberal society depended on community theater. He talked about glee clubs.

He talked about amateur opera societies. That's the living beating heart of a liberal society, are those things?

So Luca, my wonderful son, who is now doing his P.h.D. in philosophy at the University of Texas. After all of his adventures, magic and music, he ended as a philosopher, went to work as David Blaine's personal assistant. David offered him that job and it was a wonderful learning experience, much better than going to progressive school. Because he had to learn how to keep Russian models away from each other, and how to care for an albino alligator, and many other things. And David in the middle of it, this is my favorite anecdote in the book, was doing a bullet catch.

Now bullet catch he was doing it for a TV special, and in the Bullet Catch. The magician has a steel cup in his mouth or her mouth, and somebody fires a bullet from a rifle directly into the cup. You have to catch the bullet. And now normally, it's done as a trick, as a gaffe, because it's too dangerous. Twelve magicians were killed in the early part of the 20th century doing the bullet catch on stage. So nobody does it that way.

And Luke explained to me, David was going to do a true bullet catch, and I said, Well, how do you do a bullet catch? And he said, Well. It's a very strong Titanium cup, and it's a very low-velocity rifle and a very small-caliber bullet, and it's all laser-guided. I said, Oh, really, I said, So there's no trick to the bullet catch.

And he said, Oh no, dad. There's a trick to the bullet catch. the trick to the bullet catch is catching the bullet.

And as soon as Luke said that to me, I said, That's the wisest thing I've ever heard, right? Because we all instantly know what that means, right? That, after all the preparation you do when you're writing or talking, or anything, after all the ways in which you make sure that you will not be killed by the bullet. At some point, you have to stand there with your mouth open and the cup in it while somebody points a rifle at you. And that, for me, is the existential leap that we all have to make in artistry, mastery, whatever we choose to call it. And so I thought it was a wonderful story because everybody knows what that moment is of catching the bullet.

Not that you don't, dad.

Or Malcolm always has exactly the right question to ask Not that you're not doing that, dad. And so we in our household. Malcolm Gladwell is known as Not that you're not dead Malcolm, so thank you, it's not that you're not.

Our showrunner is Peter Clowney. Extra special thanks this week to Julia Barton, Morgan Ratner, Kerry Brody and Eric Sandler. Original scoring by Luis Guerra, mastering by Sarah Bruguier and engineering by Nina Lawrence. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.

The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States since it was established in 1861. There have been 3,517 people awarded with the medal. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. And our new podcast from Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia is about those heroes, what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor Stories of Courage on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.